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On the heels of the reveal of Google Stadia, Google's upcoming social, streaming-powered gaming platform, rumor has it Walmart is looking into building its own game streaming service.According to a report from US Gamer, the retail titan has been "exploring" game streaming in talks with game developers and publishers since early 2019. The report's sources claim streaming is an area of interest to Walmart, but it sounds like the company's plans are still in infancy. Walmart is reportedly still looking into options and partners, so if there is any sort of prototype, it's probably more of a proposal than a rough draft. Even so, it's interesting to hear that Walmart's dipping its toes in the wild frontier of game streaming. The games industry has been trying and failing to create a 'Netflix for games' for years, but we're only just now seeing huge companies like Google enter the fray. Like Google, Walmart has enormous resources and reach - albeit less networking and streaming expertise … [Read more...] about Rumor: Walmart is considering its own video game streaming platform

The disc-less Xbox One rumors got their biggest boost yet with a new report from Windows Central that details a name, hardware, release date, and bundled-in games. The outlet says the console will be sold as Xbox One S All-Digital Edition, and that it has even seen the console's box art. Though it withheld those images to protect its sources' anonymity, it did Photoshop up some replicas that look exactly like you'd expect: an Xbox One S without a slot for a disc drive or an eject button.According to the report, the disc-less Xbox One (which is codenamed Maverick) will debut sometime in mid-April, and hit shelves around the world on May 7, 2019. It's being positioned as the most budget-friendly member of the Xbox One family, meaning you can expect it to cost less than the current Xbox One S models. You also shouldn't expect a significant performance boost; this is another Xbox One, not the dawn of Xbox Project Scarlett.The box will reportedly include the console with a built-in 1 TB … [Read more...] about Xbox One S All-Digital Edition name, release date, and bundled-in games leaked

Google Stadia could very well be the fabled 'Netflix for games' that the games industry has been trying and failing to make for years, but there are still plenty of questions surrounding the streaming service that need to be answered. Pricing, ownership, latency - the list goes on. In a recent interview with Polygon, Google vice president Phil Harrison addressed one of the more pressing questions: how good does my internet need to be to play Stadia? "So with Project Stream [the beta test for Stadia], we recommended and set a threshold of about 25 megabits per second in order to enjoy 1080p / 60 frames per second," Harrison said. "In fact, we only used about 20 megabits per second. But we gave ourselves a little bit of a buffer in the calculations. When we launch, because we’ve made some very significant improvements to our encoder, our streamer, and our compression algorithms, we will get 4K / 60 frames per second in about 30 megabits per second. And then if you are at a … [Read more...] about Google says that if you can watch YouTube, you can play Stadia

Remember that dispute over the Redfall trademark, otherwise known as the potential title for Elder Scrolls 6? Well, all that could be in the past very soon, as it looks like ZeniMax is trying to come to an agreement with BookBreeze.com about its use of the Redfall trademark. The update comes straight from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, where the documents linked to the Redfall trademark application state that Zenimax has requested the dates to be pushed back a month, because the “parties are engaged in settlement discussions”. Just look below to see what I’m talking about. Read moreBethesda's Redfall trademark is making people wonder if Elder Scrolls 6 could be set during a deadly plague“Settlement discussions” is a fancy way to say ZeniMax and BookBreeze.com are trying to get all of this cleared up without having to go through the stress of a long trademark dispute. If that happened each side would have to argue their own case for … [Read more...] about Don’t worry about that Elder Scrolls 6 Redfall trademark dispute: an agreement could be in the works

Well, I have the answer to a question you’ve probably never, ever asked: yes, VR does work on monkeys. And turns out they love it. It looks like the chimp in question is playing a balloon-popping game, which Myrtle Beach Safari posted to Imgur way back in 2016. Thanks to the ebbing and rolling tides of the internet the video has resurfaced and you can see the full thing in action below:What’s incredible is how quickly the chimp gets to grip with the game itself, actively walking around to pop more balloons and holding the VR headset to its face to make sure it doesn’t fall off. The primates have the intelligence of the average two-year-old child, so if you wanted to replicate this experiment instead of asking a zookeeper some suspicious questions about the availability of chimps you can always use a toddler. Your own toddler, obviously. We don’t want a Netflix style chimp-toddler-VR documentary. If you want to experience the same joy as this chimp, here are … [Read more...] about Turns out VR works on chimps too, and they react just like us humans